Now that the tables have turned, Republicans can hardly believe their good fortune. There's nothing like a string of scandals to help interrupt the powerful drift and inertia that cultivates political acquiescence even in a deeply cynical electorate. And having failed to change the "Party of No" narrative that turns vague American cynicism into anti-'obstruction' animus, the GOP is hard up for a new story to tell that actually involves evidence.

The IRS and AP scandals furnish exactly that. Instead of accusations and insinuations about Obama's 'foreign' or 'anti-American' character, Republicans can now justify remaking Obama in the image of that most American of villains, Richard Nixon.

It sounds like a recipe for that GOP reboot we keep hearing so much about. But it won't be that easy.

As in so many other instances, were it still 1994, the right would have every reason to celebrate. Almost 20 years later, however, the reaction to the new Republican story about Obama by the Americans Republicans need most is most likely to amount to "Richard who?"

Young Americans have no direct experience with the level of upheaval and executive license that turned Nixon (like Johnson) into such a hate figure. Even more importantly, they have no personal connection to the level of idealism that made the '64-'74 comedown so hard and bitter.

Republicans who think the Obama scandals will open young voters' ears to a message of conservative optimism have got another thing coming.

It's not that Obama hasn't proven himself willfully ignorant about the failure of his own brand. He has -- as his bizarre performance at (yes) a fundraiser yesterday showed.

“What’s blocking us right now is a sort of hyper-partisanship in Washington that I was, frankly, hoping to overcome in 2008,” Obama said today, according to the pool report. “My thinking was when we beat them in 2012 that might break the fever, and it’s not quite broken yet. But I am persistent. And I am staying at it. And I genuinely believe there are Republicans out there who would like to work with us but they’re fearful of their base and they’re concerned about what Rush Limbaugh might say about them.”

These are talking points from the old normal. These are words written not only in ignorance of the dumb but powerful drumbeat for "bold leadership" in executing Democrats' own agenda; they're words that pitilessly ignore the sloppiness, corruption, and hypocrisy within his own administration -- which transcend partisanship in an ideological sense, but stoop to a grim form of all-purpose enemies-listing and false justice familiar to anyone around for the Johnson-Nixon years.

Obama has stuck to this bogus message because even for many nominally older voters, Democrats invoking Limbaugh get more scares than Republicans invoking Nixon. Yet if Republicans don't understand the way their message of optimism disconnects from young voters, Obama himself seems remarkably clueless about the way his message of hope has come unglued from his administration -- a way that can't be pinned on Republicans at all. He's demagoguing on borrowed time.

At best, alas, that's a blessing and a curse for the right. Calling for federal heads to roll might be wise from a policy standpoint, but it isn't going to move the needle with voters who associate Republicans more with retaliatory witch-hunts than good-government house-cleaning. (That'll go double -- or quadruple -- if the urgeto impeach Obama runs riot.)

That takes us back to the positive side of the GOP agenda -- the optimism. In the latest edition of The Transom, Ben Domenech flags a certain "tension" in the optimism wager, at least as it's presented by Paul Ryan. Ryan's most recent AEI speech gives some hints as to why:

We have to show the American Idea is superior to the progressive state—both in our time and for all time. We have to show the American Idea offers true security—because unlike the progressive state, it offers true community. Its promise is real.

Here’s what the Left got right: The American Idea needs a strong government to secure it. But a government is effective only when it is limited. And a massive government can stifle the American Idea. Government can’t replace our local communities. And it shouldn’t even try. Instead, it should reinforce our communities. Government should expand the space where a free society can thrive.

Whatever you make of "the American Idea" or "the progressive state," Ryan's optimistic view of a people thriving in liberty presumes that government has expanded into formerly communitarian precincts for 'bad reasons' -- that is, not because the nonstate forms of social order he values have been collapsing. Like nature, government abhors a vacuum, and the real source of big government in our time is a breakdown of institutions large and small that gave life a predictable trajectory.

Now here's the monkeywrench headed for the Republicans' optimism pitch: the hallmark of youth cynicism today is cynicism about predictability itself. The real-life experience of the rising generations strongly suggests that predictability in private life is a myth, or, at most, an imposition. Long-term planning makes little sense. Whether "everything happens for a reason" or not, anything can happen. People, including ourselves, are not to be counted on. The only thing that can be counted on is the persistence of power, whether on Wall Street or in Washington. And even then, who knows when the next bubble or the next scandal or the next terror attack might tip us back into turbulence?

It all adds up to a worldview that puts little stock in traditional notions of upward mobility -- economic, cultural, or both. The template for a live worth living (or for a life you can live with!) is changing dramatically, and Republicans -- who don't want to think too hard about the differences between the right's longstanding rival templates -- won't get much traction with their appeal to apple-pie optimism unless they figure out how to respond.

Some reform-minded Republicans recognize the problem, but approach the solution from a rather narrow frame of reference. The GOP, conservatives are told, needs to endorse life templates a la carte -- supporting gay marriage here, a path to citizenship there. At the same time, what few reformist Republicans there are who can think in terms of a properly human template are too dogmatically Christian to strike many Americans as offering something more than a defensive crouch in the culture wars.

That -- as you might have guessed if you've read this blog very much this year -- is where radicaltarianism shows so much promise. Instead of using our niche identities or affinities as the unit of politics, and instead of casting our humanity in terms only a certain kind of doctrinal adherent can fully embrace, a radicaltarian approach to reconnecting culture and politics in a cynicism-busting way simply invites us to consider two immensely powerful things: that we're all equally human, and that to be human is to be the creature that transfigures and is transfigured.

From that standpoint, issues like security, recognition, and well-being aren't irrelevant, but our attitudes to them flow in a subsidiary way out of our experience that radical freedom of choice and radical interconnectedness are two sides of the same coin of existence.

It all sounds pretty vague and gauzy, to be sure. But as Tocqueville so closely observed, a people like ours at a time like ours are ruled by a justifiable taste for vague and general ideas. The good news about radicaltarianism is that it's most compelling when experienced in the particulars of one's own life. It's not the kind of worldview that moves people in bumper sticker form, or on a banner in a street march. You have to live it to get it. And, increasingly -- if, as yet, mostly at the margins, where the hipsters and the millennials of pop legend reside -- our cynicism is actually preparing us to consider a radical vision of shared freedom, and not just a fearful vision of political dependence.